` find me in the clearing

[pepperstorm]

♔

the morning stretched into a sleepy sort of new-leaf afternoon as pepperstorm finally stirred in his nest. he’d volunteered himself for the dawn patrol, mostly because he’d found himself roused lately whenever cats got up for it anyway. it was nice, really, newleaf was a welcome change from the frigid, snowed in waste the forest turned into during leafbare but the mornings were still delightfully crisp. the prey was finally beginning to run again, the sounds of life returning to the trees and undergrowth and the river was roaring having finally thawed. the excuse for a mid-morning nap didn’t hurt either.

he grabbed himself a mouse from the pile as he blinked himself back awake, taking in the familiar sight of cats sharing tongues and a midday meal in the shade. the pile, while more full than it had been In moons, was still leaner than they’d like and pepperstorm felt a small stab of guilt about the mouse in his jaws. this, he realised, was an opportunity as much as it was an annoyance, to force rowanmask to do a bit of work. or… well. that was the reasoning he was going with.

it had absolutely nothing to do with the extra time the warrior had been spending with dovesong’s kits as of late. pepperstorm wasn’t jealous of apprentices. he wasn’t even jealous at all.

it was just that being ignored was not one of pepperstorm’s preferred states of being. having spent so long at the centre of his father’s world and then graduating to the bane of rowanmask’s terrible existence he found the concept of any members of his tiny little inner circle failing to find adequate time for him vexing. sure, he could always go and join another patrol or share tongues with a clanmate, even go find his father and simply spend the time with him but that, he felt, was not actually the point here.

it was the principle of the thing and that principle was that ignoring him was a fox act.

okay so perhaps ignored was putting too dramatic an emphasis on what was actually occurring. there didn’t seem to be any deliberate avoidance occurring, not like the good old days, but pepperstorm still somehow found himself spending more and more time on his own painfully aware how few close friends he actually had. now, again, he could go out there and try to find some common interests and deepen some relationships with his clanmates. make some more friends beyond the pawful he had, but that brought him right back to the principle of the thing.

so instead he left the mouse by the elder's den and ducked back inside the warrior’s den, finding rowanmask was, of course, absent. a flush of annoyance dashed through him as he backed out, determined to find the useless piece of roadkill even if he had to track him and his stupid kits all the way through thunderclan territory. fortunately, he struck gold behind the elder’s den, tucked into the wall of the camp far away from where most cats would look for him. of course, rowanmask always seemed to forget that the cats who knew him best knew his hiding places. pepperstorm announced his presence with a loud clearing of his throat before storming over to him in a huff.

“come on, move it lumpmask.i’m hungry.” he muttered, shoving his paws deep into the other warrior’s spotted side. he knew better than to phrase his demand as a request; rowanmask was not even remotely above just flat out saying no if he was stupid enough to ask for something. now threatening him with a fake choice… well pepperstorm was not above that. “you’ve got two options here; you’re either gonna get up and come hunting with me or i’m gonna go volunteer you for a whole week of dawn patrols. choice is yours.”

of course, while the choice itself was fake the threat itself was as real as the claws he dug lightly into rowanmask’s ribs. he couldn’t guarantee mistfall would actually keep assigning rowanmask to the dawn patrol after rowanmask inevitably dodged the first pawful, but pepperstorm would sure as hell keep finding reasons to ask if rowanmask decided to resist work.

coded by pinn @ thq

rowanmask | this will move in thread to the forest pretty quick. title song.

[rowanmask]

SOMETIMES I WISH FOR ( FALLING ) WISH FOR THE ( RELEASE )

❝

it would have been easier, rowanmask thought, had he chosen differently. he could have kept his head stubbornly stuck in sand, ignored everything that so much as posed a mild inconvenience to him. starclan knew he'd done it countless times before and would do it again. had it not been dovesong to tell him, to look at him with eyes that held no malice though she bore the full gravity of his impulsive, selfish decision. had he not heard the sound of his children -- his children, whose mention dragged him right underneath icy waters and sent him running right for the hills -- running amok and calling for their uncle rather than him (except rowanmask knew better than to listen to that twinge of undeserved jealousy; absence and fear kept him from that.)

except dovesong had told him. he did have his own flesh and blood, living and breathing not so much as two fox-lengths away from him. and he finally made the decision to pull his head out of his ass and stand still and let all of the choices he'd made catch up with him.

it was a royal mess -- rowanmask still couldn't look lichenpaw in the eye and see his own fire reflected in them without recoiling as if he'd been burned. the space between he and rosepaw was still miles wide, and the wrong words could send him toppling down without so much as a warning. it was grueling, and by far the hardest thing he'd ever done.

it really would have been infinitely easier to stay a coward -- wash his paws clean and turn the other cheek, the unspoken option dovesong had let hang in the air between them. but rowanmask never could turn his back on family, no matter how much he could reason they'd be better off without him in the first place. (ryecloud would never forgive him, either, and so would burnetfang. that much had him swallowing his own fears and selfishness in haste.)

but for all the changing and reevaluating and trying he'd done, rowanmask was still undeniably rowanmask.

so the moment his capacity for emotional vulnerability reached its limit, the spotted tom had gotten himself up in the middle of the night to squirrel himself away in what he'd hoped to be a spot where he could avoid having to exhaust himself be it patrols or parenting or even coming under fire of burnetfang's incessant heckling. and he'd napped in bliss, trapped in a limbo state between awake and dead as a rock. not exactly running but not exactly present, either; not even starclan's and ivystar's (and frankly, mistfall's most of all) wrath could get him to leave his little safety bubble until he said so.

or that was until a set of paws dug uncomfortably into his side, claws and all, and had him spluttering and hissing awake -- and, oh, he'd know that familiar, intentional touch of violence and forced coercion anywhere.

"that just sounds like a you problem," he gripes, but rowanmask couldn't deny the fact that pepperstorm getting mistfall to hound him was a lot more terrible than going along with whatever scheme his ex-apprentice had brewed and wanted to force down rowanmask's throat, protest or no.

and certainly none of the appeal lay in actually spending time with him, and what relief he gained just by being subject to the black warrior's torment rowanmask chalked up as a side-effect of apparently turning into a masochist for the sake of building familial bonds.

he aimed a swat at pepperstorm's legs, if only to vent frustration at being so rudely jostled awake than to actually hit him. but by some hidden force of nature, rowanmask found himself begrudgingly rising to his paws and staring down at him with a scowl and a final, "if you rat on me to mistfall, i'm feeding you to an owl."

(contrary even to his own belief, rowanmask knew pepperstorm, sometimes a lot better than he knew himself, like he could understand without having to actually know anything; and something about this pepperstorm struck a different chord in him than usual. it made him curious and antsy and on the edge of a complete mental shutdown.)

or it really could just be that rowanmask had embraced masochism a lot faster than he'd thought.

[ PS ]pepperstorm local new dad is terrible at his job and also denies that he misses hating on his not-boyfriend

[pepperstorm]

♔

beneath pepperstorm’s paws, the sleeping mass of attitude problems wrapped in an elegant, rosetted pelt began to stir. he sheathed his claws, digging just his paws in behind the other warrior’s ribs once more for good measure before backing off as he began to hiss and grumble himself awake. precautionary, of course, more than once rowanmask had woken and immediately bitten him during his apprenticeship. cats generally didn’t appreciate being woken in the increasingly inventive ways he’d found – a mossball full of water to the face, dropping rocks from a tree branch above him, sliding a live mouse under one of his legs… had it been any other cat he might have felt some lingering remorse.

alas, he felt none.

“i think its been well established that a me problem becomes a you problem pretty quickly.” he replied, sitting back with green eyes narrowed as he watched rowanmask begin to struggle back to wakefulness. now, in pepperstorm’s wealth of experience in such situations, was the most dangerous point. he was awake enough to aim a proper strike but not awake enough to consider the ramifications of starting a brawl in the middle of camp. the perfect storm, really.

sure enough as rowanmask began to rise a paw lashed out, swiping at his former-apprentice’s legs. pepperstorm pulled his forepaws up, offering rowanmask a disdainful sniff before he finally dropped them back down to the earth.

“don’t be boring.” he scolded, referring to the predictability of rowanmask’s waking behaviour. if there was one thing he could say about training under him, it had never been boring. always a new attempt to frustrate and antagonise him. some new foxhole he’d crawled into to die, underbrush pulled over some tree roots to hide him, weaving, dodging, scent trails sometimes interspersed with something rowanmask had rolled in to try and lose his doggedly determined tail. no, training under rowanmask had been many things and in pepperstorm’s opinion it was a miracle he was ever named and had any vague competency whatsoever, but it had never been boring.

they might as well not start now.

“any owl would be lucky to have me.” he drawled, reaching out to swat a cobweb from rowanmasks flank. it was unclear if he’d simply decided to lie in webs or if his lazy butt had been stashed away napping in there so long a spider had thought it prudent to weave its web on him – and, frankly, that was one mystery pepperstorm didn’t particularly want solved. there was only so much respect one could lose for a cat after all.

he stood, turning sharply on his heels to slap rowanmask clean in the face with the plume of his tail as he began to lead the way out of rowanmask’s little hidey hole and out into the cool air of the forest, the scents of the camp becoming less overpowering with each step. he trusted the warrior to know that it was in his best interests to follow, unless he fancied pepperstorm dobbing on him to everyone he could find. mistfall. ryecloud. dovesong. though… he preferred to avoid dovesong where he could. there was something about her, something he was sure had nothing to do with her personality she was generally a perfectly amiable sort of cat, which twisted his gut up in the worst sort of way.

he’d suck it up though, in the name or tormenting rowanmask, if that’s what it took.

coded by pinn @ thq

vera WITH rowanmask

[rowanmask]

SOMETIMES I WISH FOR ( FALLING ) WISH FOR THE ( RELEASE )

❝

something about the way pepperstorm so casually and so concretely laid out their entwined lives without hesitating struck rowanmask, and for a moment, he was quiet. he avoided looking back at him for fear of seeing all the threads stretched out between them - stubbornly tangled and knotted that if either person tried to pull away, they'd only end up being dragged back closer. he knew. they both knew. the individual 'me' and 'you' was already lost in the unsaid 'us', ambiguous and dangling in front of them begging to be noticed to existence; the line drawn in the sand long gone and blurred.

rowanmask didn't know how he felt about it. (more than that, he was scared that he did, and the answer wasn't anything he expected or even wanted at the start.)

if he didn't care for his former apprentice at all, he'd have retaliated, said something about how maybe the reason why they so stubbornly orbited each other was because pepperstorm was the one who perpetuated it. pepperstorm was the one who was white-knuckling all the strings attached no matter how much rowanmask painstakingly tried to cut them off. if he didn't care at all, he'd have lied through his teeth right then and pretended he wasn't doing the exact same thing.

"we're both the only royally insufferable pieces of foxdung in this forest; that's why we work. cosmic balance or some shit," he responded seriously, his gaze somehow finding pepperstorm's, steady and with a hint of challenge - this is what you wanted to hear, isn't it? - despite the wild rattling of his heart in his chest. then, with a yawn, "well. that and apparently, you're desperately obsessed with me."

it was another halfhearted, hasty attempt borne from a mix of deer-in-headlights anxiety and lingering fatigue, but if it worked, it would at least divert the conversation and give the black tom something else to yowl about and try to wrestle rowanmask to the ground for. boring, boring, boring. but for now, in the deeper waters of his subconscious he'd unknowingly thrown himself in, it'd give him enough time to suck in another breath before going under.

he felt pepperstorm's paw against his side again. rowanmask stiffened, eyes narrowed and already poising himself to pounce, before realizing he wasn't being attacked. rowanmask caught a glimpse of bits of cobweb, put two and two together, and still came out slightly bewildered. there was still a lingering force behind his action, but it was more like an afterthought than anything else, as if it was something he'd been accustomed to doing, something natural that didn't require a moment's deliberation.

the thought stuck to him like sap, and rowanmask didn't even hear what was said after. the only thing that broke through was the deliberate smack of a tail against his snout, feather-soft and ticklish and annoying and so distinctly him. before he could even distinguish up from down again, rowanmask had already dutifully stumbled after it - him - past the bustling activity and chatter into the serene hum of the forest.

"don't waste all three seconds of my time," he grumbled, briefly contemplating planting his behind where he currently stood and stay there for eternity. or sneak back to camp and drag ryecloud to replace him. but then.. he was already here, and pepperstorm was familiar grounds, and starclan, if he didn't need to take out a little bit of stress via the rightful murder of small creatures.

he snuck a glance over. had pepperstorm planned for that?

(he couldn't have. the twerp liked to talk smack about knowing every little nuance rowanmask had, but he couldn't know.)

(could he?)

[ PS ]pepperstorm I PROMSIE IM ALIVE ROWAN HOWEVER?? DEBATABLE HES HAVING A CRISIS